Tara Hunt’s The Whuffie Factor is a quick, insightful update to books likeThe Cluetrain Manifesto, the seminal work that described the means by which conversations were conducted online and advised companies on how to join the conversation without seeming smarmy or patronizing. As Hunt points out, Cluetrain preceded the rise of blogging, not to mention Twitter, social networking services, and all the other key elements of modern online conversation.

Hunt’s book is a lot shorter on theory and manifesto than Cluetrain and a lot longer on practicalities, devoting a lot of space to explaining how all these tools work and citing examples of different commercial and charitable organizations that have used them to good effect (as well as citing cautionary examples of companies that bungled things badly, usually by being caught out in deceit of one kind or another)…

Hunt’s central thesis is that participating in community and gaining social capital is the fastest, most reliable way to attain success for products, services, causes and movements than advertising and marketing are, and she sets out to re-educate executives and marketing people who haven’t cottoned on to this. There’s something of a holy mission in explaining the networked, twenty-first century reality to successful but out-dated people, if only so that execs get enough religion to give excited junior people rein to do experimental and exciting things online…”

This is a very important and interesting abstract and keynote title from Dave Lankes, associate professor at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies, about the “Conversants” project from his post today “Conversants Keynote Title and Abstract” that articulates “participatory librarianship”:

“…The mission of librarians is to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities. Through service, innovation, and leadership librarians facilitate conversations in schools, communities, colleges, government, businesses, and beyond. It is this act of facilitation of knowledge in partnership with communities that makes a library – not collections, blogs, catalogs, or ivy on walls. This is the central premise of participatory librarianship. This keynote will explore the new role of librarians as a passionate and powerful force focused on the social good. It will present a unifying approach to librarianship that seeks to make sense of Library 2.0 and information commons alike.”

External link (anchor) text is the most important factor…In my experience, external link text matters way more than anything else. That is, the actual words in the links back to your sites and pages.

If you get link text right, link back sites’ pagerank matter way less. Usual SEO advice is to contentrate on link backs from high pagerank sources…However, higher pagerank links are much harder to get than lower pagerank links. And what is often missed is that if you can get even a few lower pageank sites to link back to you using the key phrases you want to rank for, you can rank highly on those search terms even with little or no high pagerank link backs.

Widgets are great strategies…they help you get link-backs from a variety of sites, often on their front pages and often on multiple pages within the sites…it doesn’t matter if they are all low pagerank sites because you can control the link text…If you do a widget, don’t forget you need that static link in it. That is, it can’t all be JavaScript.

Don’t bother if you can’t get in the top 10…A good thing to do is to add one more word to the general term, so if you end up ranking well for the specific term you are helping your rankings for the more general one as well. Then if it turns out the specific one was easy (you quickly become #1), you’ve already gone part way on the general one.

Don’t pay any for any general SEO service…Note I’m not saying don’t pay anyone for SEO, because if you need basic help, a consult from someone in the know might be helpful to, for example, tell you how to re-layout your site and to explain this post to you :).

Beware of nofollow links.Nofollow links are links with a special attribute that tell search engines to ignore them. To check a link, view the source of that page in your Web browser and look for rel=nofollow in it… Don’t waste your time submitting comments and editing Wikipedia articles with your links because it won’t help you.

Don’t waste your time with Google Sitemaps...

Don’t ignore the long-tail…First, make sure you have a static site… Second, look at all the content you can produce or have produced. Can you combine it in interesting ways that people would find useful? For example, at Duck Duck Go we have category pages.

Make as flat a site hierarchy as possible. Pagerank seems to flow logarithmicly from a homepage to its internal pages. So if you have pages you want ranked highly, either you need links back to them directly or have them linked directly from your homepage…

Use directories instead of subdomains. For example, domain/blog instead of blog.domain.

Less is more. Ranking is distributed across your site, so less pages, less links on them, and less text on them will concentrate your ranking potential on what is left.

Don’t do anything black hat. You will get caught, you will not pass go, etc.”

“The strategies of companies ranging from Google to Microsoft and from Apple to Yahoo suggest they believe the future of the internet lies in mobile phones - but many in the industry believe the mobile web is still a long way from realising its potential…

Nokia’s executive vice president of markets Anssi Vanjoki told the BBC: ‘Steve Jobs did a great service for the digital industry by focusing the attention where we wanted it to be – on mobile and content.

‘More than one billion people have a Nokia device in their pocket. We see a big learning curve taking place with these so called mobile computers, which are about always being connected 24-7-365.

‘Everyone has an interest in mobile. And if we look at those four billion subscribers, the majority of growth is in the developing world.

‘We believe most of these people who experienced telephony through a mobile device will experience the internet through a mobile device.”

Sir Tim Berners Lee told the BBC: ‘In developing countries it’s going to be exciting because that is the only way that a lot of people will actually get to see the internet at all.”…

Google’s vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra said the migration to mobile was a natural progression for the world’s leader in internet search.

‘The entire world is moving to mobile and mobile is the most personal of all personal computers. They are increasing their importance and it has a dramatic impact on the future of Google.’

‘This year we are going to sell more internet-connected phones as an industry than the entire notebook market. These devices will become our agents, support us with advice, be our friends.

‘Through mobile and Google we are going to make the world’s information accessible and useful to everybody.'”

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methodsis a great resource if you have information you need to present visually, but don’t know the best way to express it. Simply go to the site and let your mouse hover over the examples in the different categories. Note the creative use of the Periodic Table structure…”